Tag Archives: DPW

Every day, heading onto Millbury Street, you can see the new garbage dump! Sometimes there are bags and bags of white garbage bags at this infamous spot, sometimes food galore, sometimes – like a few days ago – there’s a sofa and more refuse.

No matter how often the City of Worcester sends their DPW folks to truck the crap away, there’s more refuse within an hour or two.

People come from all over the city to dump here! Residents are sick of it!

The local crime watch group has been complaining about this spot forever… State Rep. Dan Donahue says he is going to be discussing the situation with residents …

Maybe now is the time for the City of Worcester to install video cameras and start recording license plate numbers, taking names and FINING folks – heftily.

A shooting nearby was reported a few days ago.

A week or so ago, a person outside the Hotel Vernon on Kelley Square was stabbed in the face …

Attention must be paid! The mundane work of reviving an inner-city neighborhood must be done! The other stuff won’t work if you’ve got murders and stabbings and garbage dumps! You need supermarkets, drug stores, health centers, day care centers, public library branches – stuff for the residents who live only a two-minute walk away!

Or else everyone (especially the poor! always the poor!) pays the price when a neighborhood undergoes gentrification.

We talk about keeping Worcester jobs local and strengthening our local economy. I have written about our DPW’s toxic nepotism problem.

It seems that when the City of Worcester isn’t giving municpal jobs to the same 200 or so connected families, they don’t care WHERE the city’s subcontractors come from. I saw these disconcerting sights last week:

At the Crompton Park pool in Green Island, with all the rebuilding etc, going on, a truck with a Connecticut license plate! Doing work at a Worcester job site! Then:Driving down Dewey Street – where the potholes are mini-craters (of course they are -they are in one of our poorest neighborhoods) – I see a LUDLOW (Mass.) company doing all the street repaving/repair work. LUDLOW! Next: Outside an Institute Road house, I see a Maine truck doing the asphalt repair.

All City of Worcester jobs that Mike O’Brien and DPW BobMoylan could have outsourced to Worcester companies! Believe me – they need the dough!!

Connecticut, Maine, Ludlow … . Why all these out of town companies doing good blue collar work for the City of Worcester? The City of Worcester must stop giving lip service to supporting local small companies and actually start using them!

Even if it means paying a teensy bit more money!

To City Manager Mike O’Brien and DPW and Parks head honcho Robert Moylan: START HIRING WORCESTER BUSINESSESS!

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2. Nepostism and hiring problems in the WPS system

The WPSchools Stacey Dubois Luster, head of human resources for our public schools and an African American woman, must start hiring people of color as teachers in the Worcester Public Schools. Let’s send down recruiters to Spellman College, Howard College and Temple and all those great African American colleges.Let’s have our recruiters talk to young, bright, gifted and Black young men and women about teaching in our public schools. Several years ago the City of Worcester created a little part-time job – $15,000 a year – for a WPS teacher recruiter to help hire more minorities in our schools. After only a year (or less) the WorcesterCity Council, claiming poverty, killed the position. Then, several months later, the city council voted to double their paychecks. Now all these folks (except for MikeGermain, hwo has refused the raise – good job, Mike!) make almost $30,000 a year (each city councilor!).

How lovely to wake up this morning and be greated by a toxic voice mail message (which I have recorded in my cell phone) by (most likely) a City of Worcester employee who is pissed that I suggested that Bob Moylan, head of the city’s Department of Public Works and Parks Department -and the City of Worcester – advertise for City of Worcester job openings. I saw a great 1/4 page ad in The Banner, Boston’s African American newspaper, that very directly and simply sent out a call to ALL plumbers, welders, snow-plowers, etc – especially African American ones – to fill out job applications in order to do subcontracting work (plowing, plumbing, etc) for the City of Boston. The ad listed more than 30 jobs that people could apply for and told folks how to go about doing this: visiting a City of Boston Municipal Office and getting the application to fill out or going on-line to download and complete a job application. Also, a City of Boston phone number was listed, in case any one wanted more details/help. Mayor Tom Menino (I think) proudly placed his name at the bottom of the ad. He wanted all to see: We in Boston play fair – we want to open up the process/system to minorities. (Which I believe is happening. Go to Boston, Hartford or Springfield and just see how many minorites are teaching in their public schools, working in their City Halls or public libraries! Worcester is so far behind, it’s pathetic. No make that – We’re pathetic.)

But I digress. Contrast that Boston Banner newspaper ad, that paen to open government, to THE WORCESTER WAY – the nepotism golden ($$) brick road! – the road that is lined with the bodies of brothers and cousins and pals of DPW staffers (and let’s not start examining the WPS department). When have you ever seen an ad like the one I just described placed in the T & G or other papers in town – especially ones that are minority owned? Continue reading PART 2: City of Worcester’s toxic nepotism extravaganza!!!→

How pathetic. How pathetic to see how unethical your city is when you pick up a Boston rag. A Boston newspaper – The Boston Banner – recently opened my eyes to what is supposed to happen in the City of Worcester but never happens in the City of Worcester – especially in the Department of Public Works and Parks, headed by Robert Moylan.

In the Boston Banner you will see a 1/4 page ad. It reads: “ATTENTION CONTRACTORS: The City of Boston is seeking applicants to prequalify for City contracts to provide the following services:” And the list begins; it’s lengthy and very specific. In short, the ad is telling Bostonians that the City of Boston is opening up its hiring process and making its jobs available to all qualified applicants – not just their pals or relatives (a la Worcester).

Is it the end of an era? Due to Worcester’s budget woes and DPW never ever repairing our crumbling neighborhood swimming pools – even during boom times (because most were in the inner-city and enjoyed by poor people?) – it’s bye bye, neighborhood swimming pools! So long, Crystal Park pool! Toodle-oo, Holmes Field pool! We’ll miss ya, Tacoma Pool in Great Brook Valley!

While we approve of City Manager’s Mike O’Brien’s recently proposed aquatic plan, which calls for a new and excellent family pool at Crompton Park (for next year) and the eventual building of a few other city swimming pools (to complement the two state pools and Crompton’s pool), along with a couple of spray parks, I still feel sad about the demise of the pool-for-every-neighborhood concept (especially for our inner-city neighborhoods). So here goes:

Goodbye, you old Crompton Park pool! I knew you well! As a pudgy kid from Green Island, I spent countless hours during the 1970s doing summersaults and cannonballs into your lovely blue, hyper-chlorinated water! Continue reading The end of an era?→

I noticed the street parallel to Lafayette Street is now two-way and has a lovely double yellow line painted down its middle (courtesy of our DPW). I grew up in the neighborhood. For years and years and years the street (bordering the Corner Lunch) was one way and NEVER EVER two way – or repaired. It always looked dumpy.

Why the big change?

Could it be that District 1 City Counilor Joff Smith’s family has relocated their scrap metal business there and wanted a nice new convenient two-way street on which to conduct their business – Goldstein’s Scrap and Metal? And Joff could make that happen – as soon as they made the move from their old site – Harrison Street – to the new one? Most likely the answer is yes. After all, their son sits on the city council’s street/parking subcommittee – only for most folks, it takes years for anything to happen to their street. Continue reading City Councilor Joff Smith and Goldstein Scrap Metal’s new street→

Yes! Yes! The synapses in my head are firing like mad! How they crackled this afternoon when, coming out of a store in Holden (near the Jefferson line for Gawd’s sake!), I saw a WORCESTER DPW truck sitting in a parking lot with four Worcester public works employees – slurping on milkshakes! What the heck were our DPW workers doing in Jefferson practically – on city time? Couldn’t they slurp on their McShakes in Worcester, the city that employees them? The DPW pickup truck had a double cab – a front and back seat – so no one was cramped. Thank goodness! Because it was such a fine summer day! A sunny, perfect day to take a jaunt through the country! ON WORCESTER TAXPAYERS’ DIME!!!

Pathetic.

This is why Worcesterites have so little respect for the municipal workers we pay $50,000, $80,000, even $100,000 and $150,000 (our cops’ salaries). Only to get … this – sitting in the middle of Holden in a Worcester DPW truck. Using gas that Worcesterites paid for, showing no incentive, showing no respect, sneaking around. So, how long is their lunch break? Why couldn’t these four guys take their own vehicles? Was that it for today, as far as their work goes? Were they calling it a day? Giving themselves the afternoon off – far, far away from the peepers that sit in the head of DPW and Parks Commisioner Robert Moylan? Jeepers, creepers! Or were the DPW guys going to bring Moylan back some of that good country cookin’?

We’ll never know.

Even more outrageous: the sight of Worcester Police Officers Don Cummings and Tom Daly whining during this week’s Worcester City Council meeting about losing their Quinn Bill benefits (read lots and lots of dough). Wah! Wah! We can’t make over $100-grand now! Wah, wah! We can’t take our nice vacations! Wah! Wah! We won’t be able to put in that Jacuzi! Wah! Wah! We will lose our upper-middle class way of life. Continue reading Dump the free-loaders!→